Portfolio Project

Unemployment Rate in London Over Time

Context & Question

This visualization shows how the unemployment rate in London changes over years and across months.

The goal is to identify long-term trends, seasonal patterns, and major economic shocks for the labour market.

Design Decisions

A heatmap is used to display unemployment rates across two time dimensions: year and month.

Color intensity encodes the unemployment rate, allowing quick comparison across periods.

This design highlights patterns effectively, though it does not show individual borough differences.

We could use a line chart as an effective tool for representing time patterns, but heatmap is more usefull for considering two time dimensions.

Key Insights

Unemployment rates decline steadily after the early 2010s, indicating improving labor market conditions.

A clear spike appears around the COVID-19 period, representing the strongest increase in unemployment.

Seasonal variation is present, but it is smaller than the impact of major economic shocks.

Data source: GitHub – London Unemployment